Populi provides a SaaS-based college management platform, allowing people, academics, admissions, billing, scheduling, and communications to work together seamlessly in the cloud. A customer and security-focused company, Populi cares deeply about what customer data their tools and systems are transmitting. They know what’s at stake and provide to users everything from encrypted logins to PCI-compliant technology and daily backups.

CHALLENGES

While Populi has many enterprise-grade security practices in place, they were still not confident that every aspect of their environment was being properly monitored. Populi had a network IDS in place but did not have complete visibility into the activity on their growing number of hosted systems. James Hill, CTO of Populi, needed the peace of mind that he could view everything from server logins to logged in activity so he could be alerted as soon as possible about any potential malicious activity.

In addition, it is important that they always meet and exceed PCI requirements since they work with highly confidential information. “Anyone who is responsible should go beyond regulations to protect customer data,” Hill explained. To do this, they needed to move their logs off site to a centralized location. This all led him to Threat Stack’s flagship product, Cloud Sight.

THE SOLUTION

“I selected Cloud Sight because it allows me to centrally monitor the security of our systems and reassures me that no one has been on our servers since the last time my team and I logged in,” said Hill. “Cloud Sight does everything I need; it acts as a ‘burglar alarm’, alerting me when anything suspicious happens.”

In addition, they now have centralized off-server logs available indefinitely on Cloud Sight, exceeding their compliance regulations.

RESULTS

Now, Hill and his team can confidently say that they have a proactive security posture across their entire environment. Especially after the Heartbleed Bug was announced, he was glad to have Cloud Sight in place. “Getting Cloud Sight allowed us to stop maintaining individual packages on individual boxes and aggregate ourselves,” said Hill. While Cloud Sight monitors their systems 24/7, the Populi team is able to focus on the core of their business and sleep easier at night.

Populi is also even better positioned to protect their client data from any incident small or large, as they are now exceedingly compliant to PCI, HIPAA, and FERPA regulations.

Since installing Cloud Sight by Threat Stack, Populi:

Rests assured that they have the right heterogeneous cloud security monitoring in place

Exceeds PCI, HIPAA, and FERPA regulations to protect client data

Can fix potential security issues before anyone else can try to capitalize on a vulnerability

Unlike traditional providers, Cloud Sight is built for heterogeneous cloud environments and instantly provisions new instances, alleviating resources so that Populi can instead focus on the core of their business.